Mix to the Max or Max to the Mix?: Research by design into how spatial qualities and characteristics shape the future of mixed-use business parks in the Province of South-Holland

The Province of South-Holland is one of the fastest-growing regions of the Netherlands. The metropolitan provides employment opportunities, has an (inter) national mobility network, and houses densely urbanised landscapes. Because of these benefits, the population keeps increasing. This reflects the need for an addition of 200.000 dwellings in...

Transformation of office parks into mixed-use: An exploration from the perspective of landowners

The way we work and the demand for offices is changing in the Netherlands. This poses the question whether the traditional office park is still viable. However, the demand for housing provides an opportunity to transform these outdated office parks into new mixed-use areas. This way the quality of the area could be improved, and the area could...

The added value of mixed-use: An exploratory study into the added value of mixed-use real estate development in the Netherlands

Due to the changing role of the private sector in the Dutch land development process, real estate developers are increasingly involved in realising the interests of the direct surroundings of their redevelopment projects. To incorporate the seemingly unprofitable space-use in their project, developers increasingly opt for mixed-use real estate....

Revitalize V&D Haarlem into a new HUB: Transforming the historic department store into a mixed-use building with more public life

This gradation project deals with the adaptive reuse of the vacant heritage V&D department store in Haarlem. Revitalizing the obsolete. Now that these buildings need a transformation, they also need to be more open to the public in order to remain as prominent as they once were. The project is about creating a new mixed-use hub in the city...

Investigating functional mix in Europe's dispersed urban areas

A large proportion of European inhabitants live in dispersed urban settlements, much of which is labelled as sprawl, defined by monofunctional, low-density areas. However, there is increasing evidence that this may be an overly simplistic way of describing territories-in-between (TiB). This paper defines and maps functional mix in six...

Den-City: Revitalize Former Industrial Riverbank In Shanghai

Since the economic reform in 1978, Shanghai has experienced rapid growth and development. In the past three decades, Shanghai is one of the fastest-growing cities in the world. Today, the Central Government had issued, "Shanghai will not expand itself," according to Shanghai Masterplan 2017-2035. So, China's urban development is facing a turning...

The contemporary khan: a housing and employment hub in Istanbul

In this project, the design of a contemporary version of the historic khan for new arrivals in present-day Istanbul is explored through architectural research. The research for this project focused on three aspects: (1) Istanbul, a tumultuous city between the east and west as the context. (2) The migrant trying to make his way in the city as the...

Towards adaptive facade retrofitting for enegy neutral mixed-use buildings

The purpose of this research is to provide a set of guidelines for systemized façade retrofitting in mixed-use buildings to become nearly energy neutral. Heating, ventilating, and air-conditioning (HVAC) are parts of the major energy consumption in buildings. Nevertheless, until recent times, all efforts and attentions have mainly been focused...

An urban development strategy for mixed-use office area transformation

Office vacancy has been a problem in the Netherlands for over decades. A large amount of the structurally vacant office metres can be found in monofunctional office areas – areas designed for offices only, focused on car users. A market shift in office demand has caused that structural vacant square meters in these office areas will not be...

Making a High Density, Mixed-Use Neighborhood Energy Neutral: With new urban building blocks and using renewable resources, in Western Europe

This paper describes a set of guideline that will help architects, planners and policy makers in developing high-density, mixed-use neighbor-hoods that are energy neutral by firstly reducing the initial demand, com-bining functions to reuse and recycle waste streams and thirdly to use on-site renewable energy sources to meet the remaining demand...

From harbour to city: The transformation of the 'havenstad' to a flexible and multi-functional city district

Research towards the integration of flexibility in urban development. With this research a general development strategy is made. And this strategy is applied to make a design for the Minerva harbour in Amsterdam